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Comment by doombolt | Hacker News Reader

I think the grim reality is that mono-industry towns are not viable in the long run. The world seems to have a large supply of these and their future is never certain.

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The American west is littered with ghost towns (usually mining towns).

I grew up in a single-company town; 30 years after the factory closed it hasn’t really recovered. Whole families used to work there, occasionally even 3 generations simultaneously! Loads of cases too of a father who worked on the factory floor and their kid was the first graduate in the family and in the graduate programme.

My intuition wants to say, "If a town can spring up around a company, can't the town wind down if the company shuts down?"

Two reasons why that's wrong come to mind (maybe one reason, they're closely related):

- The people who made the town chose to move there. The people who close up shop are "forced" to leave.

- The kinds of people who move to a town are "special" -- they probably take more initiative than most, they probably have smaller direct families, they're younger. Existing town occupants better reflect wider society.

That second point makes me think about cults :-). I can't remember where I heard it, but someone told me that cults have a lot of trouble with the second generation. Their parents are obviously the sorts of people who join cults, but their kids revert back to the mean and have some common sense.

If one in ten is the sort of person who might pick up and settle elsewhere, well, you can make a town with that if there's something to draw people there. If that draw dies down, though, maybe one in ten will have no trouble leaving and the rest will have more difficulty.

I wonder, though -- US internal migration is trending downward pretty steadily. You'd think it'd go up as barriers to moving have come down... Maybe this is America slowly reverting to the global mean after being a bunch of adventurous immigrants who picked up and left somewhere else.

The factory had been the mainstay of the town for 60-odd years, that would be an awful lot to wind down overnight. It was also that that kind of work was evaporating everywhere with the wind-down of manufacturing in the West in general; if the people did move where would they go?

So what's the solution? If a big company opens a factory in an area, then the hire a bunch of people at that factory, people obviously want to move closer to where work is. It's not like those people can then say "Hey we need another company to open a factory here just in case." Even if there are other jobs created in the town, the loss of hundreds (or thousands) of jobs is always going to be devastating anywhere outside of a big city.

It's easy to say "Oh well those people shouldn't have bet everything on that factory." but that's not realistic or providing any kind of solution.

> So what's the solution? [...] the loss of hundreds (or thousands) of jobs is always going to be devastating anywhere outside of a big city.

It seems like the seeds of the solution are contained in your own post: don't live anywhere but a big city. Or, if you do, realise that you are making a risky bet with your entire family at stake.

Or don't buy a house where there isn't a diverse portfolio of companies around.

Because moving from one rental to another is not that hard.

A lot of mom and pop investors made incredibly poor decisions in Australia's mining boom, buying up properties in mining towns to rent for $800k+ and after the bottom fell out of the market only being able to sell at sub $200k. Often using equity in existing loans after appreciation to pick up three, four properties.

It seems insane to me to buy even one property in a mining town, let alone multiple.

That is capitalism doing its optimization work. It will punish the people that give credit in these risky cases and the people that make risky decisions like these because of greed.

If you buy property in more diversified regions you won't make as much money, but you have less risk and short term crises will usually pan out.

The people that gave credit in these risky situations are making record profits and their dubious banking practices have made them the subject of a royal commission.

Sure they’ve been theoretically ‘punished’ for lending too much by making a little bit less profit but it sure doesn’t seem like much of a corrective action to me.

That's because the government is corrupt. If the government actually let the banks fail and bailed out the citizens instead the bad banks would be gone, the citizens would have put the money into the economy again, and you'd have an economic miracle happening quickly, as it is common after such resets.

Government subsidized failure is one of the main reasons why communism never worked out. Bad companies need to fail and make way for more efficient or less stupid companies. Otherwise you end up with all your companies operating at roughly the same efficiency as the government (close to 0), because there's no incentive for them to avoid risk. They're rewarded either way.

A city doesn't have to be big to be diverse. It just has to be "not a mining town" or "not dominated by a single industry".

By this logic people shouldn't move to the Bay Area since it's dominated by tech.

I don't consider "tech" to be a single industry, and also it's not exactly a mono-company area like a mining town.

Buying property in Bay Area is a bet. I can imagine scenarios where it won't pay off.

The Bay Area economy is diversified. The weather is also great.

The problem is that the cities with thriving job markets tend to also have high housing costs.

Actually the solution was already tried and tested by American cities. It's called diversifying the economic base. Instead of relying on 1 mammoth company, try to develop and sustain multiple smaller ones.

All American cities that recovered from the '70s-'80s downturn, and even from the 2008 crisis were the ones with a higher number of smaller employers, startups, etc. The ones that diversified. Because they are more resilient to one company's failure.

I don't think we will see any industries with mass employment, and in eithet case, there's no reason why it won't be based near the largest cities. The prospect for remote areas is grim, and that includes even large-ish cities. Even if they are afloat you won't see much investment.

> If a big company opens a factory in an area, then the hire a bunch of people at that factory, people obviously want to move closer to where work is.

I'd be very very very hesitant to move to such a town for work. Granted, when you are unemployed you may not have a choice, but I'd definitely settle for a much worse job/worse pay in a non-mono-industry town.

> So what's the solution?

Some towns adapt after a while. For example Lille and its neighboring towns in France. It used to be big in textile/coal industry.

Many old abandoned factories got converted into modern offices for startups, into stores etc... One example (scroll down for pictures) : https://www.usineroubaix.fr/fr/

So what's the solution?

Reinventing itself?

That's essentially what the German "rust belt" (Ruhrgebiet) attempted to do (partially quite successfully) in the last couple decades.[1]

[1] https://theconversation.com/redesigning-the-rust-belt-an-old...

Some part of the solution could be with city planning government officials. They could work to lure other different or complementary industries to their city/area. If the base labor skill set is similar but the parent companies are different enough, a downturn in one doesn't mean the city turns into a ghost-town.

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